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I came across an obscure writer in the archives the other day that I didn't know, Michael Fairless (Margaret Fairless Barber) and who I want to post about here because I'm interested in what you smart people think about the commentary in her biography below and how to read it [side note: I'm using 'she/her' because I have no evidence not to, and all sources do so, but I feel slightly uneasy about this]. And because, she seems intriguing.
Information on Fairless is thin. She lived from 1869-1901 in England and wrote one popular novel, and various poems, loosely mystical writings typical of the 1890s, and so forth. She liked to entertain tramps and to adopt a 'tramping' persona in her work. Most of the information about her seems to come from the biographical note written by M. E. Dowson with some of her collected works, posted posthumously.
Fairless trained as a nurse and at one point worked in the East End. Dowson - can't find much on her, but I think that her family had befriended and sort of adopted Fairless - tells us:
There she was known, I am told, as the Fighting Sister, partly because she knocked a man down who was forcing his way into his sick wife's room, partly because she could and did force her way into street fights and stop them. She was very tall and very expressive. In such cases there could never have been any doubt as to her meaning, her courage and power, or her purpose; and the slums knew her and respected her. But her wild-animal-like swiftness of action and reaction must have gone far with those people.
When I see commentary like this, my eyes narrow. I sit up a bit. But not as much as I sat up when I read this passage, about the 'resignation' that Fairless achieved right before she died of long-term illness:
There had been bitter conflict, not so well understood then, either by its victim, or by those who watched her, as it would be now. Light has been cast on hidden places of the mind since Michael Fairless died; and now we may read more clearly than ever before the unwitting self-revelation of artists in their work. Science has shown how native powers, more or less thwarted, and urgent desire, more or less concealed, declare their history symbolically in artistic creation. We know better than before that the desire and powers of a man are not blotted out when they are unfulfilled, they remain to prey upon him as the eagle preyed upon Prometheus.
So this was written in 1913. Quite a lot happened between the 1890s and 1913, or indeed 1901 and 1913 - psychoanalysis, sexology, Havelock Ellis, just for example. I mean, 'urgent desire, more or less concealed?' ('More or less'??) 'Unwitting self-revelation' by a female artist who always figured herself as male in her work? A sudden switch into vaguely suggestive scientific language and images of male suffering, right at the point when trying to explain the 'bitter conflict' that your friend had gone through?
Is it just me, or does this seem like language that is not even all that coded about what it is trying to tell us?
Information on Fairless is thin. She lived from 1869-1901 in England and wrote one popular novel, and various poems, loosely mystical writings typical of the 1890s, and so forth. She liked to entertain tramps and to adopt a 'tramping' persona in her work. Most of the information about her seems to come from the biographical note written by M. E. Dowson with some of her collected works, posted posthumously.
Fairless trained as a nurse and at one point worked in the East End. Dowson - can't find much on her, but I think that her family had befriended and sort of adopted Fairless - tells us:
There she was known, I am told, as the Fighting Sister, partly because she knocked a man down who was forcing his way into his sick wife's room, partly because she could and did force her way into street fights and stop them. She was very tall and very expressive. In such cases there could never have been any doubt as to her meaning, her courage and power, or her purpose; and the slums knew her and respected her. But her wild-animal-like swiftness of action and reaction must have gone far with those people.
When I see commentary like this, my eyes narrow. I sit up a bit. But not as much as I sat up when I read this passage, about the 'resignation' that Fairless achieved right before she died of long-term illness:
There had been bitter conflict, not so well understood then, either by its victim, or by those who watched her, as it would be now. Light has been cast on hidden places of the mind since Michael Fairless died; and now we may read more clearly than ever before the unwitting self-revelation of artists in their work. Science has shown how native powers, more or less thwarted, and urgent desire, more or less concealed, declare their history symbolically in artistic creation. We know better than before that the desire and powers of a man are not blotted out when they are unfulfilled, they remain to prey upon him as the eagle preyed upon Prometheus.
So this was written in 1913. Quite a lot happened between the 1890s and 1913, or indeed 1901 and 1913 - psychoanalysis, sexology, Havelock Ellis, just for example. I mean, 'urgent desire, more or less concealed?' ('More or less'??) 'Unwitting self-revelation' by a female artist who always figured herself as male in her work? A sudden switch into vaguely suggestive scientific language and images of male suffering, right at the point when trying to explain the 'bitter conflict' that your friend had gone through?
Is it just me, or does this seem like language that is not even all that coded about what it is trying to tell us?
